Tag Archives: interview

Dan Patlansky calls them the blues police. Men of a certain age who consider only traditional blues the real deal.

“As soon as you start changing your style to something with a slightly more modern edge, those guys just don’t believe in it,” explains the singer and guitarist. “All my music comes from the blues but it’s got a lot of other influences in there – be it classic rock, funk, soul, or jazz – because for me the most important thing is to follow your gut. Then the music is most honest, and as soon as the music’s honest and you’re passionate about that music, you’ve got the best chance at some sort of success with it.”

“We want to be the best band in the world,” declares the Broken Witt Rebels frontman. “There’s no point trying for second best.”

He’s not arrogant, just confident that the band he formed with childhood friend Luke Davis is destined for greatness. With their third EP, the excellent ‘Georgia Pine’, they’re certainly well on their way – and already a world away from teaching themselves to play the Argos guitars they’d saved up to buy as teenagers.

“It was a joke,” admits singer/guitarist Julie Eisenstein, “but I was thinking of our songs as relentlessly poppy. So melodic you want to tear your ears off.”

She’s not wrong. The Glasgwegian duo’s debut album, ‘Resort’, is all jangly guitars, woozy basslines, shimmering vocals, and huge hooks – an approach that’s seen them invited to support Ride on their first UK tour in two decades and Paolo Nutini at Glasgow’s Bellahouston Park.

Nathan James was 11 when he first realised what he wanted to be: a rock star.

“As soon as I first heard ‘Sweet Child o’ Mine’ by Guns N’ Roses I thought: ‘God, that’s what I want to do’,” the singer remembers. “At the time I was a chorister in a professional boys choir so it wasn’t really in my voice then,” he laughs, “but after my voice broke and I partied somewhat, there it was.”

A lot’s changed for Mike Doughty in the 20 years since he lived in London. He split Soul Coughing, the “deep slacker jazz” band that brought him success and anguish. He quit the drugs that helped him cope. He went solo. He wrote a memoir. He wrote a rock opera. And he started taking selfies with various food products.

But what’s not changed are his feelings towards the city he called home for most of 1996.

How would you recover from a gruelling US tour? Goldfish’s David Poole went surfing in the Maldives. Dom Peters, the Cape Town electronic duo’s other half, attended a music festival just outside his home town.

“That was probably the wrong thing to do,” Peters laughs on the line from the group’s studio. “I wore a hoodie, which helped, because everybody kept asking me what time I was playing.”

Similar situations are now likely to start playing out in North America. After a decade in which they’ve become celebrities in South Africa, Ibiza stalwarts, and regulars on the European club scene, 2015 is the year that they’re cracking the ‘States.